Contemporary Urban Space Research Articles

Streets for Cyborgs

This article separates the city and the street in order to examine them as concepts which order our experience of both cyberspatial worlds and the “posturban” city. The extraordinary persistence of the flâneur and his successor, the cyberflâneur, despite both having been pronounced “dead” can be attributed to the need to reconcile these concepts in the continued reproduction of urban subjectivities under the terms of global capitalism. However, there is a tension between the understanding of embodiment which the practice of flânerie mandates and new ontological concepts emerging from the way that the biological sciences now write the body. I will argue that new practices of spatial production which subvert the conceptual cartography of contemporary urban space can emerge from an understanding of the street as responsive to a posthuman performance of embodiment.

Gentrification, residential ethnicization and the social production of fragmented space in two multi-ethnic neighbourhoods of Lisbon and Bilbao

Simultaneous trends for ethnicization and gentrification are contributing to the fragmentation of contemporary urban spaces. This is characterised by the emergence of new social and urban units that break the homogeneity of the modern city and lead to the development of new networks, territorially discontinuous, less neighbourhood centred and with a limited intersection. With Mouraria (Lisbon, Portugal) and San Francisco (Bilbao, Spain), two traditional and multiethnic neighbourhoods, as case-studies this paper aims to critically discuss the nature of gentrification, its coexistence with ethnicization and its contribution for socio-urban fragmentation. The empirical analysis of the residents’ social networks will be used to test levels and types of interaction and the spatial formats they assume.

In/different cities: a case for contact at the margins

Long before embarking on the academic life of a geographer, I made films about cities. In the following essay, I reflect on a series of my short films, shot in the magical aesthetic of super8 film, which meditate on themes that continue to preoccupy and interest many urban geographers, in particular, the dialectic between social life and the built landscape of contemporary urban space. A central argument suggested by these cinematic excursions is that the margins of urban space share an immediate homology with the margins of the social self and that experiencing difference in spatial life is a political and social good analogous to regular encounter with difference in the lives of strangers. Such experiences of difference, these films suggest, are under threat in the neoliberal city in which gentrification, privatisation, labour deregulation and urban policing increasingly homogenise and politically neutralise the social landscape. The films can be viewed at http://www.brettstory.com/category/films-video/

The Vertical Space Problem

Populations in contemporary cities are being measured, analyzed, or represented in less than optimal ways. Conventional methods of measuring density of populations in cities rely on calculating the number of people living within a bounded surface space. This approach fails to account for the multiple floor residential patterns of the contemporary urban landscape and exposes the vertical space problem in population analytics. To create an accurate representation of people in contemporary urban spaces, a move beyond the conventional conception of density is needed. This research aims to find a more appropriate solution to mapping humans in cities by employing a dasymetric method to represent the distribution of people in a city of vertical residential structures. The methodology creates an index to classify the amount of floor space for each person across the extent of the city, a metric called the personal space measure. The personal space measure is juxtaposed with the conventional population density measurements to provide a unique perspective on how population is concentrated across the urban space. The personal space metric demonstrates how improved metrics can be employed to better understand the social and structural landscape of cities. Chicago, with a large population and a high vertical extent, makes an ideal case study to develop a methodology to capture the phenomena of urban living in the 21st century and to explain alternative approaches to accurately and intelligently analyze the contemporary urban space.

Requiem for the weeds: Reflections in Amsterdam city park

Abstract Human and plant relationships are described within the rich tradition of multispecies ethnography, ethnobotany, and political ecology. In theorizing this relationship, the issues of functionalism, and interconnectivity are raised. This article aims to re-examine the position of plants in the context of contemporary urban spaces through the prism of environmental ethics. Despite conceptual plurality and socio-cultural complexity of human–plant relationships, social scientists fail to note how the perception of ‘greenery’ has objectified plants in urban environment. Without seriously considering bioethics, theories of human–plant relationship might fail to note exploitive anthropocentric relationship between humans and plants in urban spaces. The article is inspired by reflections of urban flora in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Design for Community: Toward a Communitarian Ergonomics

This paper explores how the designed world could be better supportive of better communal ways of relating. In pursuit of this end, I put the philosophy of technology dealing with the role that technologies play in shaping, directing, mediating, and legislating human action in better communication with a diverse literature concerning community. I argue that community ought to viewed as composed of three interrelated dimensions: experience, structure, and practice. Specifically, it is a psychological sense evoked via a particular arrangement of ties and constellation of social practices guided, at its best, by phronetic reasoning. It is a mode of social being that I set in opposition to networked individualism. I examine the existent and potential communitarian ergonomics of the design of contemporary urban spaces and network devices. However, I conclude that artifacts remain only one part of the picture. A communally ergonomic mode of being requires not only compatible artifacts and built spaces but also an institutional context supportive of community as an economic and political entity.

Human Traces in Urban Spaces

Over the last two centuries many major cities have undergone large-scale modernisation that has led to the growing sense of homogenisation associated with such locales across the globe. The fractal logic that is at the heart of so many urban settings, where the whole system is made up of parts that are identical to the whole, seems to serve in making anonymous everyday experiences. Public transport and its corresponding street furniture, if thoughtfully designed and planned, has the potential to form an integral element in the promotion of a sense of identity, interconnectedness and flow within a city. Furthermore, bus stops, benches, litter bins, curb-sides, posts and pavements, to mention a few, offer interesting cases to consider how people truly engage with contemporary urban spaces. These objects—part of routine and made familiar—are elements of daily lives that are ingredients towards visual and multi-modal experiences. In addition, these are places where individuals encounter sociality and materiality in ordinary and sometimes extraordinary ways. This paper uses a visual ethnographic approach towards exploring the human traces of routine activities that have an impact on the cityscape. An Investigation of these details found within the urban landscape lead us towards understanding how we engage with and navigate cities. This is essentially an urban archaeological study that looks to reveal how non-designed phenomenon in urban places can contribute to our image of a city, providing a reflection on homogeneity within the built environment. Our visual ethnography focuses on six major cities: two each in Britain, Europe and North America. The findings of this work illustrate through visual analyses three key characteristics: first, how urban spaces are transformed intentionally and unintentionally; second, how transformations are practical, functional, beautiful and sometimes ridiculous; third, how transformations reveal values around visual and multi-modal experiences inherent to people.

La observación participante y la deriva: dos técnicas móviles para el análisis de la ciudad contemporánea. El caso de Barcelona

We are territoriants, radicants, transumers, travelers in the global city. With these figures we give shape and meaning to the contemporary urban space. Such space and the practices that give rise to it are related to the constant movements, flows and interconnections of people, things, data, ideas and goods presently under way, thus being directly linked to the paradigm of mobility and the radicant logic. In this context, it is necessary to use mobile methodology, the best suited to the contemporary cities and their inhabitants. This paper deals with this issue. Mobile methodology is defined and its practices are shown through two specific mobile techniques: participant observation and drift. The paper also highlights how this methodology is especially useful for studying the current urban context and the practices that take place there, as it shares the constitutive logic of the phenomena studied.

URBAN IDENTITY IN COLONIAL TUNISIA: THEMAQĀMĀTOF SALIH SUWAYSI AL-QAYRAWANI

AbstractThis article presents a microhistory of an early 20th-century Tunisian intellectual, Salih Suwaysi, within the context of cross-regional (Maghrib–Mashriq) literary and intellectual trends. Analyzing Suwaysi's use of the conventional literary genre ofmaqāmātillustrates his deep understanding of the problems caused by France's occupation of Tunisia and highlights the significance of historical and contemporary urban space for the author. Revitalized during thenahḍaperiod,maqāmātwere employed by writers to address issues and problems facing contemporary society, in contrast to some of the earliermaqāmātthat focused on language and language structure more than on narrative content. Suwaysi followed his eastern Mediterranean, especially Egyptian, contemporaries in turning to this genre to convey his critical commentaries on social, religious, and political life under the French Protectorate in Tunisia.

Public life in Bangkok's urban spaces

The paper examines public life within Bangkok's urban spaces on the premise that user needs and satisfaction should play an integral component in the design of these spaces. An ecology-culture-behaviour paradigm is introduced to appropriately rationalise the relationship between urban design, ecology and sociology. Bangkok, a canal- and river-based port city, echoes the urban morphological processes of early Southeast Asian coastal settlements, but differs in its social and physical construct because of its lack of exposure to colonial dominance. Only in the latter part of the 19th century, when Western influence was introduced and became stronger, a change in its physical form was manifest, but the city still retained the social construct within its urban spaces and activity nodes (i.e. informal, commercial and religious spaces). Bangkok street users and their corresponding activities within the contemporary urban street space are also examined through field observation and survey to paint an overall picture of the behaviour and attitudes of the street users. The Bangkok experience presents a case of a dynamic city with competition between its traditions and the Western contemporary influences on its urban spaces. Finally, the paper reiterates the significant need to reconsider the intrinsic relationship between ecology, culture and behaviour to better understand the life between structures to create an urban space that satisfies its end users.

Perspective on the Problem of the Chinese Urban Space Homogenization and Identity Creation in the Era of Globalization

Era of globalization, the homogenization of Chinese cities has become reality, how to understand and face this? How the cities varied from the metropolis, inland cities, tourist cities, to deal with the issues of the city style? With the methods of interdisciplinary study, this article applied the important contemporary globalization theory into urban studies, and explained the causes of contemporary Chinese urban space" homogenization" with government institutional perspective. In consequence a classification for the urban characteristics in the era of globalization was made. Then a scientific definition of the urban context was argued out through the dialectics, the article concludes that globalization has led the homogenization of contemporary people demands along with the recessive context of political, economic, and cultural environment, eventually determined the result of urban homogenization. This article pointed out that there is still urban characteristics and differences in the era of globalization, the city's characters can also be shaped. But more autonomous and more pragmatic strategy should be adopted such as urban style combination views. Our protection for historic towns and buildings is necessary, but it isn’t a valid path to create the contemporary urban identity. We should fully explore the diversity of the harmonious coexistence of city buildings, by managing and creating different levels of urban identity.

Visualising the riverbank

Drawing on ethnographic observation of a tract of urban riverbank in the city of Trento, in northern Italy, we attempt to link phenomenological observation of social interaction in public places with larger political concerns about contemporary urban public space. While agreeing with Low et al. (Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space & Cultural Diversity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005) that in order to foster public spaces it is necessary to accommodate the differences in the ways social classes and ethnic groups use and value urban sites, we also argue that one should be wary of planning hubris—which can occur in even ‘good-willed’ planning, and leads to the creation of domesticated and formalised, but also inherently restricted, spaces for encountering differences.

Foucault, the Other Spaces, and Human Behaviour

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was one of the major thinkers whose work offers a new approach to space and spatial thinking of our modern world. This article will explore his conceptualization of heterotopia and subsequent interpretations of it, with the ultimate purpose of examining its benefit and implication to the understandings of the complex nature of our contemporary urban spaces and their relations with human behavior.

The role of the outdoor space in the containment of the energy consumption of the building

In most of the contemporary urban spaces built in recent decades in Italy little attention is evident on the creation of environmental niches that are able to mitigate the microclimate. The following research aims to verify how the physical design of the outer space affects either the immaterial dimension of the space itself (livability, comfort), and the environmental performances of the surrounding buildings. The research supports the definition of the energetic-environmental requalification techniques to be used in the recovery phase of buildings. The analysis of the microclimatic features in the outdoor urban spaces, together with the implications in terms of comfort for those people who use them, opens new possibilities for the development of urban areas for what concerns both the new design and the requalification of the existing built-up area. Because of the complexity in terms of space-time variability of such parameters and of the wide set of activities in which people are committed, there have been so far very few attempts to understand the external comfort conditions, but mainly of how the external climatic effects could have an impact on the internal comfort conditions of the inhabited area.

La frontière-seuil, figure clé de la métropolisation contemporaine

The threshold border – a key feature of contemporary metropolization. Starting with the idea that today borders are changing, becoming more specialised and more transversal, this article aims to examine the complexity of the contemporary metropolis – the mainly urban living spaces of current societies – and the project processes which act on these metropolises. The “border” feature therefore becomes an interdisciplinary access key. Through various interpretations by geographers, philosophers, political pundits and sociologists working on the issue, borders are interpreted as a political, society and spatial phenomenon dressed in a complexity which calls into question contemporary urban space and its relations with the society it houses. Based on this vision of borders as a complex issue, the article proposes to examine the processes underlying the phenomenon of metropolization and suggests an interpretation of the interplay of producing and re-composing borders which today have an influence on human establishments in their spatial, political and social realities. Ultimately, the article puts forward the hypothesis of metropolization as a process that generates borders of all kinds, borders which attach themselves to broader themes such as passages, crossings and flows, thereby enabling others to examine the process of the urban / Metropolitan project in an alternative fashion.

Drugs, Violence, Fear, and Death: The Necro- and Narco-Geographies of Contemporary Urban Space

This study considers the ways that narcotics, violence, and death affect contemporary urban space. Though geographers have long investigated patterns of drug use and death in cities, few have analyzed how drugs and homicide-with the capabilities to alter both bodies and space—produce change and profoundly influence urban sociospatial contexts. By unpacking multiple narratives of daily violence and drug use from the favela community of Pirambu in Fortaleza, Brazil, the need is shown for nuanced spatial analytics that treat the relationships between narcotics, homicide, and fear, and account for their roles in shaping everyday urban landscapes. Important for understanding the interconnected spatial relationships between past and present (and future) events, necro- and narco-geographies also shed light on the ways that people encounter and experience space in a growing number of urban contexts worldwide.

Urban Qualities in an Emerging Regional Metropolis: The Case of Doha

Since the late 1990s, Qatar and its capital city Doha have been undergoing a new period of urbanization. Doha is viewed as an important emerging city in the Gulf region with a growing potential to constitute knowledge economies as a foundation for its future prosperity. Driven by economic diversification strategies that aim to establish the city as a global service hub, sport and media events and cultural facilities are being developed in order to brand the city as an international service center. This contribution aims at introducing a responsive framework for analyzing the complex inter-dependencies between knowledge economies and physical urban developments in Doha. In this respect, this is an ongoing research process, as part of a QNRF-NPRP funded project, which seeks to deliver insights into the complexity of the various factors that produce urban space and their individual effects on urban qualities. Based on Henri Lefebvre's triad of space production (conceived-perceived-lived), a framework has been developed and particularly devised to explore the inter-dependencies of Doha's recent economic transformation and the changing structure of its urban environment. The framework involves comprehensive analysis of urban planning decision making processes as well as in-depth investigation that applies interlocking network models to examine how urban space is currently used by companies of new economic sectors. Taking into account the importance of the role played by the employees working in these companies and their perception of contemporary urban space in the city, the framework utilizes empirical research techniques that involve survey studies, focused interviews, and behavioral mapping. In addition to investigating the various factors driving spatial transformation, the evolutionary aspects of the city's urban structure are traced and analyzed using GIS data and space syntax studies. The results of implementing this framework are amenable to establish a comprehensive understanding of the potential and deficits of Doha's urban environment, which in turn, foster the city's aspirations in establishing a thriving knowledge economy.

Os sentidos e os significados dos artefatos culturais na economia contemporânea: proposta de interpretação dos edifícios hoteleiros instalados nas cidades

Esta é uma pesquisa exploratória de caráter bibliográfico e documental, cujo objetivo é compreender o processo de criação e composição do valor dos objetos arquitetônicos como mercadorias culturais inseridas na lógica específica da circulação do capital nas economias contemporâneas. Para tanto, este estudo se apóia em investigação conduzida desde 2007 e que congrega um banco de dados que atualmente reúne 672 empreendimentos hoteleiros localizados no Brasil e no exterior, de forma a procurar constituir uma proposta de identificação das formas mais comuns de edifícios dedicados total ou parcialmente à hospedagem, vistos estes edifícios enquanto artefatos arquitetônicos. Procuramos também caracterizar o conteúdo da estrutura material de hospedagem nos aglomerados urbanos inseridos no mapa turístico mundial, desde a perspectiva de leitura dos edifícios hoteleiros como mercadorias urbanas. O estudo mostrou que o design aparece como um elemento de diferenciação capaz de maximizar os resultados da chamada economia de signos e espaços e a participar de maneira efetiva e eficaz da dinâmica social de valorização do capital (em suas mais diversas formas) nos processos de reestruturação de espaços urbanos contemporâneos. De maneira específica e direcionada, o estudo confirma a estética arquitetônica dos edifícios dedicados total ou parcialmente à hospedagem como elemento capaz de reorientar de maneira efetiva os significados do consumo hoteleiro nas cidades, o que se reflete diretamente no aumento do valor material, social e simbólico da hospedagem no circuito cultural e financeiro das economias urbanas contemporâneas.

Ethics and public space in contemporary Western societies

Space, as the material field in which personal, collective and social practices develop, is imbued with the values and meanings of each occasion and is shaped, as regards its organization, content and form, in correlation with the different aspects of a predominant ethics and/or the conflicting value systems that characterize the specific production context. A disputed term that is relativized in accordance with the formative cultural, geographical, environmental, technological, social and economic context, ethics has from Plato to contemporary thinkers provided answers to questions relating to values, meanings and how to live as an individual or a society, proposing concepts or systems differing in their epistemological character, particularly in cases of descriptive ethics and meta-ethics. This paper attempts to record, comprehend and critique the contemporary content of ethics, the difference in relation to earlier periods (i.e. modernity, if we accept that the age of globalization on which we shall focus coincides with hypermodernity), and its effects on the constitution of contemporary urban public space in the Western world.

Deaf youth and cultural negotiation in Porto Alegre, Brazil

This paper is the result of a survey of 40 young deaf people from different social classes in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The aim is to discuss issues related to the dynamic of accessibility in contemporary urban spaces and its relation to deaf people. In this sense, arguments emerge relating to communication, especially with regard to the use of the Brazilian sign language, LIBRAS. In this context, it is necessary to recognize deaf culture, a field of study within cultural studies, which places the deaf subjects in a position of cultural difference in relation to the listeners, so that these youngsters are often grouped in some public spaces as a way of claiming rights and living as equals.